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Page 553
conventions of amour courtois, which venerated women and set them up as goddesses, into fashion; this was also the time of the cult of Mary, when the Mother came close to surpassing the Son in religious significance. This does not mean in hard fact that women were really venerated and well treated, but a conscience about them was developing. John did not even pay lip service to this conscience. He starved the wife and young son of William de Braose to death; he seduced and sometimes raped (by political if not physical force) the wives and daughters of his noblemen.
Lloyd points out that John did not have more illegitimate children than other preceding English kings (except Richard, who acknowledged none) and therefore claims that his reputation for lechery was unjust. This is nonsense. No one (except possibly a religious fanatic) expected a king, or any other man for that matter, to be chaste. Some were, and were praised for it, but those who were not were criticized very tepidly, if at all. Despite religious fervor, sins of the flesh were not important in medieval times; they were confessed and absolved as a matter of course. There was nothing Victorian in the medieval view of the body and its needs. The number of bastards a man fathered and acknowledged was irrelevant. What gave John a reputation for lechery was the fact that he dishonored "honorable" women, using his power to force compliance.
Worst of all, John did not keep his word. He reneged on promises. Often these were unwise promises, and he was right, in modern terms, to go back upon them. In his own times him behavior was, again, "dishonorable." To the medieval mind an "honorable" disaster was preferable to a "dishonorable" happy outcome. Of course, every man probably sidled around strict honor from time to time. John was simply unlucky or not astute enough to get away with his defections from the code.
In any case, in his own time King John was accused of horror upon horror. It is unlikely he was guilty of all;

 
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